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Intel Slashes Computer Startup Times
An anonymous reader writes "At Intel's Developer Forum in Taiwan, Intel introduced a new Non-volatile caching technology called 'Robson'." The new Robson cache technology allows computers to start up almost immediately and load programs much faster. Intel declined to comment on the specifics of how the technology works only saying that 'More information will be revealed later'.
FTFA: "It's up to the [equipment manufacturers] to decide how it will be implemented. My guess is that enterprise users will likely see it first," [Mooly Eden, VP and GM of Intel's mobile platform group] said.
S.Jobs: "Oh, yeah?"
The biggest application for this will probably be laptops. If the computer has 1GB of space for a page file and other stuff, then it will spend a lot less time accessing the hard drive. Less hard drive spinning means longer battery life.
Actually, maybe the reason we're _not_ rebooting too often is because this technology has not existed. No one will wait 5 minutes for a computer to startup, but this might make it more reasonable to do so. With the current energy crisis, I like this idea.
No Sigs!
I've been hearing this touted for over a decade, now. "In the future, your PC will turn on as quickly as your TV!"
The thing is, I don't care how long my computer takes to boot. With decent sleep and hibernate modes, I don't need to boot more than a couple times a month anyway - and that's usually rebooting for software updates. (If you're wondering, this is on a PowerBook G4 laptop).
It takes my computer under a second to wake up from sleep mode. How much more "instant" does it need to get?
Now, those quick-loading programs, on the other hand, do sound appealing...
This doesnt seem to be about start up times at all (except from Hibernation). All it is, is a large HDD cache. This will do nothing to make PCs "Start up" Faster. It only has affect in the Article [aparrently] because the "slower" laptop had put its HDD to sleep.
I think PC Hardware and Software manufacturers really do need to work on the glacial boot times that PCs have. Unfortunately, this is only a solution to some of the minor problems, and not the main ones.
Move along... there is no sig here.
Agreed, but perhaps that's the Unix background peeking through. Windows in general needs too much rebooting, I say. More time should be spent on making it more dynamic and flexible so you don't have to restart your computer every time you uninstall a program or update windows.
At any rate, the theory behind instant startup isn't too hard, it's just an engineering implementation.
All you do is make it so that, following shutdown procedures, the computer immediately switches to startup, except keeping track of the fact it was "shut down," not "restarted." When it finishes restarting, it writes the startup RAM state to disk, then turns itself off.
Upon being turned on, the computer just writes the stored RAM state back from the disk to RAM, and presto! It's just like starting up the computer, except really fast. At least, that was the theory. I've been sort of surprised not to see this implemented, it seems like everyone would like to see fast startups, but hardly anyone cares how long it takes to shut down (especially with soft power)- you're done with he computer anyway. I've heard that a lot of work goes into decreasing boot times for Windows and OSX. It seems like a lot less work to implement an "instant startup" plan, and then not have to care much if startup takes forever, than to carefully track, fiddle with, and optimize everything that happens during startup.
Of course, with this system, restarting after a crash would not be instant, it would take just as long as ever. So it might work to greater advantage on some operating systems than others, depending on why you usually restart.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I kid, I kid.
I reboot maybe once a week. However, I also work in IT and a reboot really does solve a great majority of problems on the platform. It's not so much the OS as other programs. The worst part is that Windows doesn't have an unconditional kill so some process just never dies and never lets go of all the files and handles. So when you go to restart the program, it fails because a previous instance is still hanging onto the files/handles. So we have to reboot the machine.
The thing that drags when we reboot our big Dell workstations isn't so much loading the OS as loading other programs and the SCSI detection process. Then there's the log in script that runs. Robson will only really help with a small chunk of the total boot-up time. As our computers get more networked, I expect network lag to drag us down as well during boot-time.
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I think this could be most interesting with regard to dual boots - especially with regard to Mactels with Windows onboard. You can switch operating systems without rebooting, or without going through all the loading and calculation involved with rebooting. Virtual PC has a "Save PC state on shutdown" option which already does this. When you quit virtual PC, everything its doing is simply stored, and recalled very fast when you reopen this. Implementing this for x operating systems on your Mactel can't be impossible. Each OS stores itself and then restores the one you want before terminating itself - you could switch from Linux to OS-X to XP in as little as 20 seconds each change!
I don't know why Intel is working so hard to try to make Microsoft look good. Improvements to hardware can't fix shitty software.
Because when Microsoft looks good Intel Looks good. Most people do not know the difference between the OS and the hardware. When the OS is slow they get new hardware, figuring their computer is just old and slow. While in the short term this may sound good but what will probably happen people will be frustrated with the intel system (Figuring it is a peace of junk) and Go with AMD or what ever else. And by chance they may go with a PC manufacture that doesn't pre-load the computer crap so they get a computer that seems extremely fast so people my not go with Intel again.
Windows is even more embarassingly beaten when you compare OS X Server with Windows 2000 or 2003 Server. Those fuckers take FOREVER to reboot.
This again may point to the hardware. A lot of time when I see a window server boot a bulk of the time is before it gets to the OS Level it is just probing for SCSI devices or doing a detailed check on all the ram (The issues TFA is saying it improved) If you want to see slow take a look at a Sun Enterprise system, they can take 5 minutes before they show you anything on the screen. The reason for this slowness is the fact that because these systems should go down often they need a full check on the hardware to make sure nothing is wrong after month/years of uptime.
Also the issue with Windows vs. OSX Server is that Windows can run on Any Box so it needs to check for as many possibilities as possible. While OSX knows what to do when it asks for the hardware configuration and the hardware responds XServe G5 32gb RAM. You can fault windows on a lot of thing, But I give them credit for being able to run on all the crap it does.
IME, OS X boot times beat the living shit out of Windows boot times. I've seen years-old, sub-1GHz G4s boot faster than home-built (i.e. lacking all the extra, cycle-eating horseshit programs that hobble your average Dell or HP PC) 2.0+GHz Wintel boxes with fresh installs of XP.
I don't know I have seen XP having a rather snappy boot up time, it is about on par with OS X. The only real difference is XP tends to still boot after the start button appears, allowing you to access the interface. While OS X takes a little longer in the Splash screen.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Computers just keep getting slower. I'm afraid to see how slow a new dual-Opteron machine is.
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The worst part is that Windows doesn't have an unconditional kill so some process just never dies and never lets go of all the files and handles.
Yes it does. Killing a process from task manager is the same thing as kill -9. When the process dies it unconditionally releases all file handles, mutexes, and any other resources that it had open.
The only time that won't work is if the process is stuck in a system call somewhere (i.e. in the kernel). That usually means buggy device drivers which unfortunately are all too common in the Windows world. It could also be a bona-fide kernel bug, though those are fairly rare (but I do know of one way to cause a vfs lockup on any version of NT -- including fully patched 2k3 server -- without admin rights).
I see the same thing happen all the time on Linux. For example if a process is stuck trying to read a file that's on an nfs server that has become unreachable, not even kill -9 will get rid of it. Even *BSD sometimes gets unkillable processes in cases where the underlying hardware has gone to lunch. I see it sometimes with flaky CD burners, for example.
Up to about 1996 my regular computer was one that booted virtually instantaniously. It's just that it didn't run Windows, Mac OS or Linux. RISC OS (as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) was/is in ROM/FLASH and was there the moment the machine started. I held off moving over to a PC/Linux basically because of boot times. Admittedly with linux you just leave the machine on so it's not an issue but Windows was/is a real pain.
Well LinuxBIOS has been getting boot up times in the 3 second range for a while. Nothing new move on. http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page
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Yes it does. Killing a process from task manager is the same thing as kill -9.
ROTFL.
Unix "kill -9" will terminate any process, regardless of the process' attempts to keep going. Windows task manager will kill almost any, but not all processes, most of the time. But when you really need it, it turns out you hit that "almost" part.
The difference is, in unix type systems, SIGTERM and SIGKILL are handled by the OS and the process is only informed of them (so it can try to shut down properly), in Windows, the process is being asked nicely to close. Windows process is free to ignore these events.
Thus it's quite easy to end up with unkillable process. Not to mention that some processes are considered system (or something) and task manager will refuse to kill them flat out. On Linux you can kill even init if you like (not a wise thing to do - but you can).
There is no unconditional forced kill in Windows. Even MS admits that.
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